syncing external audio

Ben - BTW. Thanks for all your insight and help on this board. You are a great resource.

In my experience I've done alot of syncing with H4n audio and the Canon 7D. I have been really surprised at how well it works will large amounts of background noise.

For example we did some interviews in a busy shopping mall and interviewer in the 7D reference audio is barely discernible, while the h4n audio came from a Lav mic and is clean. Shockingly, both PluralEyes and FCP X were able to sync it (of course FCP X did it in a few seconds while PluralEyes took a minute or so).

While this is just one example I have others with equally noisy reference audio that have been able to sync. However, I have had some projects that I thought were cleaner, but wouldn't sync at all. I would conclude that you can't really make an conclusions based on the noisiness of the reference audio other than most of the time it works, but sometimes it doesn't.

After a few misfires, we started always using a slate as a fallback when shooting dual system sound (MovieSlate for the iPad is a great inexpensive solution.)

Movie*Slate rocks!!!!!!

We shoot on 7D's a lot, too, and record audio on a MBP. It's been very consistent that audio won't sync when the audio is bad quality for us. But I have had several of my students not be able to sync good quality audio on occasion, also. I'm waiting for Apple to improve the algorithms for this function. It's got some growing up to do.

Yes, always slate, always, always, always, and not just for audio sync, but for LOTS of reasons. Makes media management a no brainier.